The popularity of the Internet, coupled with the ever-increasing capabilities of personal/mobile electronic devices, has provided users with the ability to enjoy, as well as to generate for others to enjoy, multimedia content almost anytime and anywhere. For example, users may receive streams corresponding to live and video on demand (VOD) content (e.g., television shows and movies) at personal electronic devices, such as computers, mobile phones, and tablet computers. Further, users may use a personal electronic device to capture and stream live events (e.g., sports events) to other users. An amount of bandwidth available to stream a live event may vary from location to location. For example, a sudden decrease in available bandwidth at the personal electronic device may result in a viewer of the live event stream experiencing an unpleasant viewing condition (e.g., loss of color, loss of definition, stuttering, choppiness, pauses, distortions, etc.).
Although an encoding bit rate that is used by an electronic device to generate such a stream can be set based on an amount of bandwidth that is available for transmitting the stream, it may be difficult to calculate or even measure the available bandwidth over a given network connection. Also, network conditions that affect the overall available bandwidth often change during a streaming event. Under uncertain and variable network bandwidth conditions, a media system can attempt to provide a high-quality media stream by continually increasing the bit rate to fill the available network bandwidth and then lowering the bit rate when the bit rate has exceeded the available bandwidth. However, simply increasing the bit rate is often not the most effective method to use additional network bandwidth to improve the quality of the media stream. In addition, increasing and decreasing the bit rate as described above results in a system that tends to oscillate the bit rate up and down, which may produce undesired noticeable effects that undermine the perceived quality of the media stream.